It's a tale of survival, brutality, humanity and ultimately hope, set against a harsh nature but hardly putting the blame on it. It's Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf and it packs a stirring amount of grace and finesse. Set in a realistic and hauntingly familiar post-apocalyptic future - though this is never the focus - Haneke shows the struggle, harrowing hardships and human dignity through it that defines those faced with the worst of times when all is seemingly lost.

It is in many ways about faith in this journey. When religion becomes even with doubts, and seemingly crumbled, faith is the ultimate test the family traveling away from the bitter cold and into stable shelter must face. The…

Tenth watch of Dystopian December. Michael Haneke and the theme of dystopian futures seems a match made in heaven as the director normally manages to make his non-apocalyptic films pretty dystopian already. With the slowly paced Time of the Wolf this fantasy is turned into reality and the result is admirable on the one hand, but a bit of a disillusionment on the other. If you enter the film with no knowledge on the plot (forasmuch as one can speak of the existence of such a thing), you’d think of the first scene as one wherein a family is seen on the first day of their vacation out in the woods. That idea is immediately shattered and we are instead…

Bleak and melancholy but ultimately uninspiring. A post-apocalyptic film by Michael Haneke sounds like it may certainly be worth getting through, even if it would undoubtedly be a tough watch. And although it's definitely not lacking in atmosphere, I fear as though it's never able to amount to much which is something I often feel when watching post-apocalyptic films.

Beginning on quite a powerful note, Time of the Wolf quickly turns into the standard affair of a family trying to find shelter followed by them waiting with others for something to save them. It's not the sort of narrative I find…

Time of the Wolf, or ''everyone yells and cries at each other for two hours'' is Haneke's attempt to make the most difficult film to watch ever created. You see one fateful night in 2002 Haneke was pondering just how to make his films more depressing and harrowing. Then it struck him, he didn't have to play chess on the board, he could move the pieces into the mud and play there.

One could call the film reserved, reserved in a way that it isn't as 'edgy' and 'grim' as others that feature masses of rape, torture, and cannibalism; this isn't that sort of film. At first it seems rather ''out there'' for Haneke. I thought maybe giant television sets…

The work of Michael Haneke is not to be taken lightly, and The Time of the Wolf is certainly not an exception to this unwritten rule. Coming back around to this a second time after exploring much of his oeuvre, has offered greater insight into his intent and how the film ties into his familiar themes on human nature and social behaviour. Here in this post-apocalyptic setting, we are offered a glimpse into the shifting dynamic of the family unit under duress and the rebuilding of social order (with glimpses of the social 'ism's' coming to the fore) when it has all but been removed due to an unexplained phenomenon. This…

"Set somewhere in Europe in what appears to be the near future, Haneke's apocalyptic fable takes a rigorously realistic approach to material all too often compromised by hackneyed spectacle and sensationalism, simply tracing a family's attempts to survive in a countryside deprived (for reasons wisely left unexplained) of electricity and clean water. Darkness is the film's dominant metaphor, underlining not only the uncertainty felt by Isabelle Huppert, her two kids, and those they encounter on their travels in search of food, safety and something resembling normal‚ civilisation‚ but also the terrifying threat of absolute solitude. Since Haneke refuses to provide the usual dramatic climaxes, the film demands an attentive curiosity from the viewer not required by more conventionally generic fare, but the strategy has its rewards, not least in the unexpected emotional force of the final two scenes." (Geoff Andrew)

An affecting submersion into all of the familiars virtues of man being replaced with that of his worst vices, but not without leaving us the most moving and meaningful reminder of the virtue that was once so readily visible.

Tenth watch of Dystopian December. Michael Haneke and the theme of dystopian futures seems a match made in heaven as the director normally manages to make his non-apocalyptic films pretty dystopian already. With the slowly paced Time of the Wolf this fantasy is turned into reality and the result is admirable on the one hand, but a bit of a disillusionment on the other. If you enter the film with no knowledge on the plot (forasmuch as one can speak of the existence of such a thing), you’d think of the first scene as one wherein a family is seen on the first day of their vacation out in the woods. That idea is immediately shattered and we are instead…

Time of the Wolf (2003) film thoughts... I have had this on the list for a bit and dived this morning. It's a French film that follows a small group of people for a few days during the aftermath of some unexplained apocalypse. It's extremely bleak and shows what happens when society totally collapses. There is not a happy moment in the film. What I didn't like though, that it really didn't bring anything new to the table and it was rather plodding. There are a million films like this.

If you haven't seen any post apocalypse genre films (like the classic Testament and their ilk), I'd say go for it. It's not bad, just kinda average to me. It only proves one thing though, everybody on the planet needs to lay down their arms and make peace already. NOBODY is going to win and it's only going to lead to this...

As usual, Haneke is interested in frustration, in leaving things out of the narrative and (at least some of the time) subverting our expectations for the type of film this is. Of course, this being a Haneke film, the only expectations he doesn't subvert are those for bleak despair and sudden shocking violence. The film is, at times, uncomfortably raw. It is also, at times, spare and unengaging to the point of occasionally having nothing at all on screen worth seeing (and yes, I get that this creates an atmosphere and makes us uneasy for the characters and their situation, but come on).

Oddly enough, though, as badly as some characters act and as pessimistic as it is about humanity's self-serving, fearful ways, the film has a strain of perverse hope and even humanism running through it, such that it suggests there's no real way to make it through the wasteland alone.